


Sherlock Dreams

by Tammany



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Dreams, Gen, Poetry, Surreal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-19
Updated: 2014-04-19
Packaged: 2018-01-19 23:36:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1488331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pretty much what it says on the tin. Sherlock dreams. A rather fluid, poetic, Magic Realism spin on who Sherlock thinks he is, who he really is, how he relates to various people and issues. Far from complete or comprehensive, but then, dreams aren't. </p><p>This turned out to be more an exploration of writing Sherlockian stream-of-consciousness in dream mode than anything. Trying to find the poetry and images to describe a man who in many ways is not correct about his own nature, nor the natures of a number of the people in his life. So this is a dreaming Sherlock dancing a sleepy, poetic dance with his own observations and his own delusions.</p><p>It's not a STORY. It's a dream.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sherlock Dreams

A steel-winged nightjar slicing a midnight sky of faint starlight and the blaze of London city-light all wrapped in fog and fantasy—that’s what Sherlock’s mind is. Feathers picked out in etched filigree; gleaming and glinting, mouth agape for prey, turning on the point of a primary feather that bends with the torque of his spin.

He is his mind. Subtle, agile, ever so slightly uncanny.

When the thoughts run smooth and the deductions purl out like churring cry of the nightjar, he is _Sherlock_. The race through night streets, the whip of the wind in the skirts of that lovely, chance-found Belstaff coat, the flutter of the scarf on his breast: Sherlock. Sherlock Holmes—consulting detective. The first. The only. He created the job himself, no less than his brother (of whom the less said the better) invented his own position as the one-stop-shop of governance, diplomacy, and espionage.

Sherlock’s tried Mycroft’s gig—until they benched him. Now he’s got his own gig—a gig with more independence, more variety, more satisfaction. He has The Work.

(Do not mention that once The Work was cloak and dagger, spy-versus-spy. He does not mention those days, even when he once again runs as a hound in Mycroft’s Wild Hunt. He’s not Mycroft’s Hound anymore. He’s a nightjar dancing spirals against a moon dimmed by citylight. He does not mourn. He steals the identification out of Lestrade’s pockets, out of Mycroft’s desk drawers, just to prove he can, just to remind them he’s slipped their leash and escaped their pack.)

He is his mind.

He’s learned the rules of mind, he thinks. The care and feeding of genius. Fresh meat only—the freshest and most choice. “Nothing below a seven, John.” Always a puzzle. Always a challenge.

Better still, to surround himself with challengers: angry Sally and her hot, black eyes, glaring fury at him as he sweeps up clues and tosses them in the air, only to have them land in pretty patterns she never dreamed possible. John, friend and court fool, peer and peon. Enemies like Moriarty, to test him to the utmost.

“Caring is not an advantage,” Mycroft murmurs, and Sherlock agrees, stubbornly ignoring the soft wistfulness, the tone of resignation in his brother’s voice; hearing only stern warnings instead of aching revelations. Sherlock prefers the harsher version—in smokes and in sentiment, he prefers high-tar, harsh and cruel and devoid of comfort. He does not want to know Mycroft’s heart breaks, has broken, will break again.

He does not understand Mycroft…and, yet, he copies what he thinks he’s deduced. So quiet. So still. Steel and silence and secrets and solitude and stoicism. Mycroft is smarter than Sherlock—which harshes Sherlock’s buzz—not that Mycroft would have a clue what that meant… Mycroft is smarter, colder, more rational, and Sherlock has learned the care and feeding of genius. Fresh meat and a soul of ice, a glacier to sleep upon, a black night sky to fly in alone.

That is what he sees when he sees Mycroft. That is what he emulates. That is what he is when he takes wing--the nightjar spinning on the pivot of a single primary feather, the nightjar wrought in steel. He is cold. He does not feel. He is Sherlock, and Sherlock is mind.

(“Yeah, all right, ‘Spock’, just…” John says, voice fond and frustrated and unconvinced. Yet in the end John believes…John knows Sherlock doesn’t feel things that way—the way ordinary people feel things. John knows he’s ice, like the Iceman.)

What is confusing, he thinks, as sleep drags him down into dream, and dream drowns him in revelation—what is confusing is all the warmth and pain and love and need that keep tempting him from the ideal. Even in sleep, as he tumbles through the mist rising over the Thames, darting through trailing streamers of fog, half-bird, half man, a Chagall bird-man, he finds roses and women and violin music that sweeps his heart away…

Ravising-ravishing-ravishing-ravishing, the nightjar sings, churring its song. Ravishing. Life is so ravishing.

(The Woman walks on the top of the Thames, her feet firm on its flowing waters. She puts up a hand to wave to him, and smiles, and he thinks, “I wonder where you are now….” Ravishing. Ravishing-ravishing-ravishing…)

“You have no idea of human nature, do you?” Mary had asked him.

“Human?... No,” he had said. “Nature?...No.”

Mary was a liar—but so was Sherlock. Moriarty had known. Irene had known. Mycroft knew, though Sherlock would never give him the satisfaction of admitting it.

Hearts were a nuisance. One could not seem to choose who to love, or how, or when, or even if one would love at all. Even love as a lie could turn to steel-edged truth and pierce you through. A tabloid and a sharp word could leave you as damaged as a bullet through the chest, though it left no scar.

He had held Janine, so sure he was steel and shadow, a nightjar, a spinning point in the night sky, alone, untouched. Untouched, he had touched her. Touching her, he was no longer untouched.

“Once,” she had told him, “once long ago there were four children—three boys and a girl, the children of Lir. And their auntie Aoife, for jealousy and spite, put an enchantment on them and turned them into swans, wild swans, to fly forever…” She’d said it in her rich Irish accent, more Dublin than Belfast, more East than West, but sweet for all of that.

The woman he did not love. Or should he say that with a question mark?

Sherlock, sleeping, dreamed on.

A bird, a swan. A hound—one of Mycroft’s own.

 Mycroft’s hounds hunting the Hound at Baskerville—the giant hound.

In his dream John and Lestrade and he ran together over the moor, baying their prey. He was a deerhound—he leaped, he flew, taking wing, taking flight, only to race again over the heather and through the gorse. John was bullmastiff, golden and sturdy and sweet as sugar right up until the moment he realized you were not a nice man, when he’d take your arm off and open you up from your guggle to your zatch. Lestrade was the wild-card in the pack. He looked like an Alsatian…and then you realized that, backward from every movie you’d ever seen, he was really a wolf—a big silver-dapple loner passing as a tame dog.

God, Sherlock loved to run with them. In his sleep he could feel their flanks brush against him, hear the pant of breath beside him, know the pleasure of the hunt. In the far distance he heard Mycroft’s horn, calling in the night. Lestrade shouldered into him, turned him from his course, kept him to Mycroft’s pattern. Sherlock couldn’t care: it was night, and they were running, and the blood sang in his veins and his heart was bursting with the beauty and joy of the pack.

“Caring is not an advantage…..,” Mycroft said, softly, pensively. Then, almost as an afterthought, almost as though he’d forgotten he wasn’t alone, he’d added, “Sherlock.”

All lives end. All hearts are broken.

In sleep he could ask himself—whose heart had Mycroft’s broken over? What lives had his brother lost and mourned?

“Did you miss me?” the Other said, laughing, hand up a sock puppet with Moriarty’s face. “Did you miss me?”

Sherlock stirred in his sleep and turned away, frown settling between his dark brows.

He slept alone.

There had been a time he had not minded that—had reveled in it. Cool sheets, wide mattress, simple crisp coverlet, his sleigh bed clean-lined and neat. He could lie in bed and know everything that mattered was where he wanted it. Thumbs in the fridge in a zippered up bag. Microscope on the table. John up in his room reading a mystery novel. Mrs. Hudson down below, making tea. Mycroft a mere call away, but out of sight, out of mind: a resource without being a nuisance. It had been as though the entire universe, in stately beauty, had spun in complex paths around his simple, celibate bed. A Sherlock-centric universe. He was the heart of reality, and from that heart his mind could fly—up and out and around, a steel-feathered nightjar, alone, alone, alone. They are lonely birds, nightjars. Not flocking, like swans. Not racing in packs, like Mycroft’s hounds. Solitary.

“Where are you now, I wonder?” The Woman asked him in return, her feet still firm on the lapping waters of the Thames. He perched on her finger, and she stroked the bristling feathers by his beak.

“You wouldn’t catch me a second time,” he said in return, fluent as an animal in a fairy tale. “I know you, now. I am steel. You can’t trick me again.”

“You tricked yourself,” she said, still stroking his throat and wings. “You always will, until you understand what a soft, sweet bird you really are.” And she held up a mirror, a pretty mirror, and he looked in and saw a soft, brown bird with a plush breast and eyes too big and dark and dreamy to belong to his steel-feathered mind.

“I am steel,” he said.

“Ravishing-ravishing-ravishing,” she called in tones like an English horn, as she flew away—a great white swan soaring over the Thames. “Ravishing.”

“I’m steel,” he said again, spinning on the pivot of a single primary. But the feather was soft and supple, and his voice was a liquid churr as the dawn turned the city to pearl….


End file.
